Chastity

The Canadian bishops have issued a letter to young people on chastity.

There will be a lot of sneering about this, so let me start with what I think is very good about it and then I'll rant.

The letter is worth reading solely for the following lines from the introduction:

Besides the gift of speech, he gave us our body. This body expresses itself through gestures that are themselves a language. Just as our words reveal who we are, so also does our body language. The Lord intends that we speak this “sexual language” truthfully because it is the way to live our sexuality joyfully.


This truthful living out of the sexual language of our bodies is what the Church calls “chastity.”

That's good stuff. Speaking sexual language truthfully is the way and I say this speaking as someone who learned the hard way how not to live sexuality joyfully. You could really stop reading right there.

Here is basic truth that you won't hear often that goes right to the heart of the matter: Getting good at sex is not like getting good at sports or getting good at music. If you want to play the clarinet well, you need to practice with other musicians. But sex does not work like that. Sexual "practice" with other people does not make you better at it when you get to the person you really want to spend your life with. It makes you worse at it. Sexual love is about connecting with one person and every other person in the mix is a barrier that you have to overcome. And that goes quadruple for previous partners you were in love with as opposed to just having had sex with.

The bishops have put their collective metaphorical finger on something really important here. Speaking sexual language truthfully is absolutely necessary if you want to love happily. It is not sufficient but it is necessary.

Unfortunately, the bishops don't even get one paragraph beyond that wonderful truth before trotting out a lie:

But in reality it is much more than simply the absence of sexual relations. Chastity calls for purity of mind as well as body.

Actually, chastity is not about the absence of sexual relations at all. A chaste marriage is a marriage with sex. The above statement is not wrong so much as it is nonsense. The problem here is that we have two competing notions of chastity.

• One model has it that chastity is about a committed relationship and chastity is the sort of sexual behaviour appropriate to that relationship. Someone who marries forsakes all others and so does someone who commits their life to Jesus through consecrated life.
• The other model is based on a cult of virginity. It says that while married people can be chaste that chastity can never be as good as the chastity of virgins. In this view there are degrees of chastity.

The problem here, I think, is that virginity and chastity are clear different things. They have almost nothing to do with one another. At no time in my life have I ever been less chaste than when I was  teenage virgin. I had no sex in those years; I did this entirely out of timidity. My body was untouched but my mind was cesspool. And I'm far from the only one to have had that experience.

I am much closer to chastity as a married man than I was back then.

The key quality we seek in chastity is to be pure and you cannot make yourself pure. It simply cannot be done. Once something is diluted, it is diluted forever. Purity is a not a human achievement, it is a gift from God. And this is where virginity misleads us. Virginity is something that can be lost; it is something we must constantly protect against losing if we are to value it.

Chastity is something that can be gained. When you hit that dark day where everything seems lost and you feel far away from God because you have been living a sexual life based on communicating lies and not truth, you can turn to God and say, "I want to be clean again". And he will not deny your plea. It won't be easy but he will help you as you struggle to open the doors to truthful sexuality.

What the world needs today, and especially young people, is to be told that you can, with God's help, become chaste. No matter what you have done until now, you can become chaste. You can have spent the last five years as a prostitute and chastity is open to you and the chastity that is open to you is every bit as good as the chastity of virgins. Sorry to rant but that is the truth. Purity comes by the grace of God and the grace of God is equally open to everyone. Rant over.